Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

This is very true. And what the police have experienced here has been awful. Protesters have attacked them with hammers. With slingshots, using steel balls as projectiles. They've thrown firecrackers at them, they've been exhausted, hungry, and given conflicting orders--

https://twitter.com/JGuehenno/status/1071482449794867200

Read this blog post from a cop who says he was at the CdG Etoile last week. (I haven't verified his identity. It sounds truthful, but I don't know). Loosely translated highlights: blog.francetvinfo.fr/police/2018/12…

"Apart for some of the guys who’ve worked in Corsica or the worst neighborhoods of Paris, Saturday was the worst day we’ve ever seen. A wave of violence that didn’t stop ... The idea? Break the cop, simply. No matter what means they used, they only had that in mind."

"Paving stones, smoke, barricades, slingshots, paint with glycerol and acid—they used them all as weapons to hurt us, harm us, kill us. As they say, “a good cop is a dead cop.'”

"Breakfast at 4:am, a sandwich at 5:pm and a hot meal at 10:pm, went to bed at 1am."

"In total, my company had 15 wounded, including one very seriously, and many bruised, all sprinkled with detonations and tear-gas nonstop. Nice recipe, isn’t it?"

This part is important: "At 8:45 a.m., I was stationed with my company on one of the large avenues in the 8th."

"They were already screaming with anger everywhere, singing, blowing stuff up, breaking furniture. They were chanting 'CRS are with us,' [the cops are on our side] even though they were hateful toward the police. Is the point of all this to make the President fall? Not so easy."

"We can’t put down our arms; we’re the last bulwark protecting the institutions. .... [Police are] the eternal wicked of society. The radical fringes of the yellow jackets reproach us, like many others do. How are we supposed to respond to people’s anger about us doing our job,"

"and even more, our duty? Why all this violence? Why so much hate towards us? I was thinking, 'would I end this day alive, hurt, just bruised? Will I watch my colleagues get hit? My wife, my children, my parents ... how do I reassure them?'

"watching us live on TV...must be horrible to for the people who love us. All of this is going through my head. But I have to focus ... especially because 500 casseurs were coming up on our backs—"

"and it’s a wild gang of masked ‘yellow jackets’ but they’re hooded, scarves around their faces, and dressed in black, wearing hoodies, more than determined--coming our way. No it’s not a nightmare! Our first reaction was to break off quickly in an alley to limit the damage--"

"and avoid being caught between the Place de l'Etoile and this horde. We don’t even have time to say “Amen” before a storm of paving stones, scrap metal, paint, glass bottles falls on our company. When we’re ordered to, we respond with tear gas grenades that we throw by hand,"

"sound grenades launched from the ground—so that we don’t harm the people facing us. Then the big tear gas grenades. It doesn’t stop the rain of cobblestones coming and crashing into my colleagues’ legs, knees and hands. Some of us are wounded and they say so, but we hold."

"At that moment, you just pray that your colleague doesn’t drop his shield, because that would open a breach. I hear screaming in front of me because I didn’t have time to warn my colleague that the paving stone would hit his hand full-force. He’s a tough guy, he holds on."

"Another on my right screams in pain, a stone got hurled at his knee. Thank got for his leg, later it’s going to get another stone thrown at in the same place. There are days, like that, where you can tell yourself, 'You got lucky.'”

Note the lack of reinforcements.

Hand-to-hand combat continued all morning, he says. The fire truck finally arrived, then bulldozer to pull down the barricades. But no police reinforcements.

They launched one tear gas grenade after the other.

"We breathe gas again, again and again. We cough, spit, sneeze ... it stings, it burns our eyes and we have to use decontaminant to stop the effects of gas. Even if you’re used to it, it’s hard. ...

"When I get the orders I try several times to hit the slingshots from which they’re hurling acid, paving stones, paint [rubber bullets, I assume] They even emptied a fire extinguisher and filled with paint to water us ..."

He then writes that another three thousand protesters ran at them from another avenue. Still no reinforcements. They have no idea what to do. “The orders are to block the street,” he writes. “So we obey.”

Then another crowd rushes them from another avenue.

They use the same tactic, trying to drag them into an alley to cut them off.

By five p.m, they still hadn’t eaten. They’d pushed the casseurs back, so he gets the signal from his commander to eat. As he walks away he sees the CdG Etoile looks like a massive fireworks display.

He’s never seen anything like it. He calls his family to say, “I’m fine,” then he rushes back to relieve his buddies so they get a chance to eat, too—but by the time he’s back, the casseurs have returned, and they have to fight them off again.

By 8:00 pm, their morale is fading

he writes. He says it took them until 10 pm to push the last remnants back with tear gas. This is last Saturday.

He concludes: “The day’s tally: Damage, theft, looting, fires, wounded, a stolen assault rifle, almost 10,000 tear gas grenades used and 492 arrests.”

But no, they didn’t kill anyone. They managed to get through *all* of this without using their firearms. (Nor were firearms used against them.)

So people are still obeying some rules. Critical ones. No live fire. Everything else goes, though,

however lethal its intent or effects. But yes, it's amazing the cops didn't kill anyone. They could have. They're armed.

He continues: "To that tally add the city of Paris damaged, the Arc de Triomphe looted and sacked; memory of our ancestors fouled and scorned by a totally

"lost society. Law enforcement overrun by rioters...streets without reinforcement further down to prevent them from coming back, contradictory orders, sometimes no effective results: We’re seeing more and more determined casseurs on whom teargas no longer works."

"We cops understand the anger of yellow jackets. We’re living in the same mess as they are. For us, too, life is getting harder and harder. When we take our uniform off, we’re men and women."

I haven't contacted the author, but no part seems implausible based on what I know.